Luke blinked down at the very tiny girl with dark purple hair sitting to his left. “Uh, hi,” he tried. Up until now the little girl had been eating her food and not all that interested in the state dinner going on around her, and Luke had been talking with an ambassador from a world he hadn’t quite caught the name of so it’d been a stressful forty minutes so far.

“Do you want help with the silverware?” the little girl asked. “Only you’re eating your salad with the dessert fork.”

The messenger arrives a few weeks after Crait, dressed in cloth of gold and piloting a ship that costs more than the entirety of the Fleet. (Not that that’s saying so very much these days). “On behalf of Her Royal Majesty Queen Hoyoan and her Consort the Princess Ji’ii of the system Reylouris, I humbly beg audience with the personage known as Rey,” he says. Possibly she, or some other pronoun; Leia literally can’t see more than a pair of eyes under all the cloth.

Of course, of course she has a better handle on it than him; he can find her, sometimes, but she can shut him off immediately; all he gets are impressions, not even ideas much less any sights or sounds. But she can pull herself into his mind at will—sometimes he doesn’t even notice she’s there until she leaves, pleased with whatever she’s watched or heard or ferreted out. It’s like swatting at a fly, one too fast to catch, with only Raglien pincers.

Vice President Aaron Burr, Esq.
Desires the Honor of your Presence
At the Wedding of his Only Daughter and Jewel of his Heart
The most Remarkable and Wisest of Creatures on this Earth
Beautiful and Accomplished beyond all Reckoning
To
Phillippe Humlidon

so this fic has CONSUMED me for the last week or so, since I was weak and broke down and started reading it before it was finished. Well. It's finished now! And it is SO GOOD.

It takes place between original trilogy and new movie, from the pov of Poe from childhood to shortly before VII starts. And it's good on so many levels! For one thing: makes sense of the galactic political situation. For another: the characterizations of Poe and Luke, and the relationship as it develops between them. For another: it's a story that's deeply situated in a large cast of characters who are all important and have complicated relationships with each other. And I really appreciate that for a story that starts with two characters meeting as adult and child, it works really hard at getting them to a place of being as equal as possible when one of them is Luke Skywalker, Mythic Saviour of the Galaxy.

And basically I had SO MANY FEELINGS. Damnit. I didn't want to get this invested! BUT HERE I AM. What a good.

(possibly the meanest thing in this entire fic was introducing us to the Luke's Jedi Academy students such as to get us thoroughly attached to them, so that we will be heartbroken when Kylo Ren eventually kills them, as he does.)

“It’s perfectly logical. We’re bound to be caught at some point together, and as far as I can see there’s no downside to connecting Mr. Warren to Mr. Wren socially. We’ll have an easier time explaining ourselves being together if we’re observed being together, and since you’ve vetoed all of my suggestions for activities that you could take up—“

"This the kind of fiction that is, like, disregarding all of reality. In the real world, Alan Davies is married with children, Stephen Fry is king of the benevolent twink-daters, and as far as we know, they've never been each other's plus one to anything, much less a soiree. However, you should understand that the stuff about Stephen Fry driving a cab around London is totally true. Look it up. That happened."

"It turns out knowing that Steve's breath catches whenever you press teeth against his throat doesn't mean he can't still make you want to murder him whenever he launches himself off a roof in pursuit of a suspect or decides there's not enough time to put on his vest before busting into a meth lab and beating people up."